#30 Extend and Connect

Extend and Connect

Bake fractal cookies! Simple geometric shapes and substitution fractals are easiest to make, but experiment with different shapes. These are popular treats on math holidays such as Pi Day or Sonya Kovalevsky Day.

Read stories about fractals and draw pictures for them. The hydra grew two heads when Hercules cut out one – can you imagine what that looked like, some time into the fight? The hydra story is about powers of two. An Indian legend about the inventor of chess asking for one grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on, is about powers of two as well. “When I was going to St. Ives” is a poem about powers of seven. It can be traced back to a five-thousand-year old homework problem, found on an Egyptian tablet.

You can represent metric measurements as substitution fractals based on tens. For example, there are ten decimeters in a meter, ten centimeters in a decimeter, ten millimeters in a centimeter, and so on. There are several beautiful interactive tools where you can zoom in and out through the powers of ten, exploring sizes of objects in our Universe.

Make a fractal collage out of found objects, such as leaves of different sizes. You can also cut many copies of the base shape at once, out of folded thin paper. Recycle magazines for random splashes of different colors within similar shapes that make a fractal.